Friday, July 27, 2007

So today I go to my miserable school(MTSU)'s Financial Aid department and find out that I no longer qualify for any financial aid. Great! My reward for making $5K more this year was receiving $5K less in federal education grants. Let me tell you how encouraging that is.So now I get to finish school with even more debt than I thought I would. So, I've gotta hustle to come up with some extra money to help me with books, tuition, living, etc. this semester. I figured now was as good a time as any to wrap up my record and sell it.I decided not to get "pro" reproductions done, because literally every single person I know who has done that has been thoroughly burnt by the process and left with 200 copies of their own record under their bed.So what you'll get is a CDR with a nicely home-printed cover.14 Tracks, 51:01 long.I'm selling for $12 shipped to anywhere in the world- right now. If the orders start killing me with shipping to Fiji or something I might have to add something for international buyers.BUY IT NOW! (click that button to paypal me) Make sure to include your full address(including country) and email in the forms.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

This record has always been a favorite, and this song in particular.I'm still doing a lot of cover material, because I'm still having lots of trouble writing material and no trouble producing...doing covers is just a fun way to keep making music.deltasleep- Yours Truly, 2095.

Friday, July 13, 2007

When the original Napster lawsuits began happening over filesharing, they seemed like a publicity stunt, or at least they felt sort of temporary. Maybe it was the novelty of it, but it felt like the internet died a little bit when that mentality began to creep into the next 5+ years. As a child, I grew up with the internet. As such, the internet feels like something we helped create to a lot of people my age. I painstakingly dug through manuals and documentation to assemble, install, and fix the early computers of my house when computers were a much more annoying and complex ordeal. (Younger users can't imagine having to assign their own IRQ or DMA channel to hardware) The internet was a new domain for the transmission of information, it was like an enormous library of information. It helped peel back the layers of whitewashing from the history of popular culture. Popular, commercial culture in America thrives on the relentless fad machine. The possibility of now digging through unseen commercials, out of print records, and media that was later censored and removed from the public eye has helped a very large portion of internet users like myself come to a better understanding of recent history. So when the potential of the internet gets damaged a little bit like it has by the RIAA, I feel very strong, personal feelings about it. That ever vigilant hand of corporate media, angry at the loss of their king maker status and their new inability to control the fad machine, has been in constant pursuit of the destruction of everything that makes the internet great. The great shift in money making methods for the record industry in this decade has not been from the sales of CDs to the sales of MP3, as it should have been, but in the shift from the sales of anything to the wholesale creation of profit generating lawsuits. And the worst part is, the US Government is on their side! The real problem seems to be that the codgers in Congress and the Senate have NO idea what they are even fighting for. Observe the following, now legendary quote by Ted Stevens of AK on the topic of Net Neutrality.The definition should be imminently clear to any literate person who read the net neutrality link above. And yet, it's not clear to the Senate. Because they didn't read up on it. Because they don't understand why the internet is important.

Also, notice how I had to include only a video with the audio of Ted Steven's brilliant speech? Thats because I couldn't post the actual C-SPAN footage of his speech, as C-SPAN has copyright protected all video of senate and congressional hearings and sent nasty-grams to Youtube to remove these videos.Copyright law is so unprepared for the internet, and it will be 50 years before we have enough senators or congressmen young enough to do anything about it!

Only just this week SoundExchange, a royalty tracker of (in my opinion) dubious non-profit status, threatened to begin charging royalty payments to internet radio stations. The originally proposed scheme meant the end of internet radio, a friend of mine who DJs at an internet radio station cited his bill at "somewhere near $50,000" or, about 50 times his annual budget.I once had the unique displeasure of having an ASCAP executive come and speak to my "Math for Liberal Arts" class at MTSU. He completely hijacked the discussion into a discussion about how "wrong" filesharing was. (and it was a badly cliched discussion- even once resorting to the "loaf of bread" talking points) He also discussed the recent creation of a process of listening to audio on radio and calculating royalties- and how the early tests of it showed so many royalties owed that ASCAP and BMI would be out of business if they actually paid them. But when I pushed him further, he admitted that most large volume musicians have to file suit to collect the royalties they were promised.

So, I'll be giving my record away and trying to work out a live show to make a few bucks with. When you play some sort of psychedelic electronic country niche, you should just take your listeners where you can get them.

Monday, July 09, 2007

My stomach churns as I think about entering a semester as an education major during which a presidential election takes place. The level of ignorance and outright disdain that a lot of politicians and politicos show towards the education system is embarrassing. All they have is solutions. Every single politicians knows exactly how to fix education. The Republicans want to reward "performance" with higher pay for teachers.

The Democrats want to continue to throw grants and funds at a system they and everyone else know is broken:

It's extremely easy to debate any of these candidates on education. They all ignore the elephant in the room: culture.It's just not easy to say to a group of voters: your culture is failing your children. Your culture has destroyed the institutions of marriage and family for half of the children in the country. Your culture expects nothing out of children, and rewards them for everything. (every kid on the soccer team is the best kid on the soccer team, and every one of their kicks is wonderful)There's a reason that immigrant populations from east Asia, south Asia, and Africa do so much better than their native born peers. They're raised in the same neighborhoods as kids who drop out at high rates. They're resisting drugs at a higher rate. Their test scores are notably higher.They're also typically living in two parent households with parents who have high expectations for their children, and who aren't afraid to check their kids when they screw up.

It's just not a money issue anymore. Yes, there are schools out there that need financial help. Probably all of them. They're run like social security senior citizen's homes. They've got holes in the roofs. Money will fix roofs, but it won't fix attitudes.

I'll throw my idea into the fray as well: Education needs more focus on critical thinking and data evaluation, and less focus on progressively increasing the amounts of junk that gets crammed into standardized tests. Data goes bad, critical thinking does not.And by more, I mean like an entire class EVERY day for at least an hour.No skill will benefit children more in an era where anyone can edit the encyclopedia.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

I just got a Casio MT-600 and I am in LOVE with the thing. Luckily, it fit the adapter I had lying around from a mostly unused, enormous, Casio CT-640.It has the same sort of sound as the lower range in the MT series, but it has an ANALOG FILTER! The DCO tones occupy a great sounding transitional space between the MT series of super simple organi-ish tones and the all PCM sample based tones of the CT series that succeeded it.That means instant classic when combined with an inability to stay in tune, pitchbend, and a really low sample rate, noisy output.Witness the awesome: MP3Everything in that mp3 but the drums is completely unmodified MT-600! To get some of the chorus effects I multitracked the same parts with the fine tune knob cranked.It's not too hot with bass- it doesn't go too low.I plan to do a mod I found on the interweb that boost the cutoff and resonance limits and brings a control for each out on the front panel. I'm skiddish though, because these are hard to find, and I really like it the way it is. But all these sounds beg for some kind of hands on control.$2 from a trailer park yardsale.